Blockchain Ardor Part 3: Introductory Tour of Ardor Parent Chain’s Features

Welcome back to the Blockchain Ardor — Medium Series! This article provides an introductory tour of the live features available on the Ardor “parent chain” mainnet as of August 2018. The information presented here represents a modified version of the information in the 11-minute long video on youtube titled, “Blockchain Ardor: Demo and Tour of Ardor and Ignis Features” — available here.

If you would like to participate in this tour in real-time, you will need to download the Ardor Client from the Jelurida website. An article explaining the download process is available here.

Ardor Feature Tour

Let’s get started! Open your Ardor desktop client and log in to the Ardor chain.

Verify Your Public Address — First Time Users

If this is your first time accessing your Ardor account through the client wallet, you will likely see 8 blue boxes on the Dashboard and a message across the top to validate a public key (pictured below).

Normally, you should only see 2 blue boxes on the Ardor dashboard — but you must complete the validation of the public key first. You should click the orange button in the message bar, enter your secret passphrase, and then copy the newly displayed public key. Once you are ready to make your first transfer of funds to your Ardor wallet, it is essential that you include the public key in that first transaction. This will literally change the interface you see in the client.

Ardor Dashboard

Now that your account is verified, there are 2 blue boxes on the Ardor Dashboard — your account balance and the most recent block information. Your recent transactions on the Ardor chain are listed below.

Looking at the very top of the screen, you see the button to Send ARDR (indicated in red below) — this is how you would begin a new transaction.

The circular symbol (indicated in orange above) is a shortcut to your Unconfirmed Transactions. Notifications are represented by numbers displayed in the blue and gray circles (indicated in yellow above). The symbol of a person is a contact book, the gears are a shortcut to your settings, the question mark takes you to guidance documentation, the tree chart takes you to the web wallet, and the power button logs you out.

Navigating Between Child Chains

The current account’s public address is located in the upper left corner (red). Beneath that, you see the current Ardor balance (orange), and the blockchain we are currently on (yellow).

Remember, child chains are their own blockchains, they are simply secured by Ardor. So, if you want to use the functions of a child chain or see balances on a child chain, you must navigate to the specific chain.

For example, we see in the photo below that Ignis has far more functions built in, and there are multiple balances on the Dashboard.

If you are interested in learning about issuing assets, new monetary supplies, marketplaces, messaging, cloud storage, and other functionalities — you should check out the article on the features of Ignis, available here.

Search Box

Let’s navigate back to the Ardor chain.

The next box allows you to search for specific accounts, transactions, or assets on the blockchain.

Understanding Your Two Ardor Balances

Let’s focus on the main dashboard for another minute. Click on the “more info” button under Account Balance and let’s discuss some key terms.

Your Ardor coins have two “values.” There is the actual coin itself, and the power of the coin to secure the network through Forging.

Actual Value (green in the image above)

That first value of the coin, the coin itself, is represented by the first 3 balances: Balance, Available Balance, Guaranteed Balance. The only difference between these 3 is the Guaranteed Balance updates every 1440 blocks, or approximately every 24 hours.

Forging Power (blue in the image above)

Now, the second value of your Ardor coins, the securing power of the coins, is represented by Effective Balance and Forged Balance. Both require 1440 blocks to update.

The important thing to understand is that the actual value of your coins (Available Balance) represents your current spending power at a given moment. Your Effective Balance can be 0 for a variety of reasons, such as leasing your balance to a forging pool, but you always retain your spending power based on Available Balance. If you are interested in learning how to begin forging or leasing your balance, refer to Part 5 of the Blockchain Ardor Medium Series here.

Decentralized Coin Exchange

Here, you can begin trading between Ardor and its 3 current child chains — AEUR, the 100% backed Ardorgate EURO peg, BITSWIFT, an extensive technology store and service provider, and IGNIS, the smart transaction powerhouse.

An important note about Ardor is the fact that all of its child chains are interoperable — meaning, you can trade directly from one to the other without needing to convert to Ardor, or any other intermediary token.

Another point here — when you are on the Ardor chain and you enter the coin exchange, you can buy Ignis using Ardor. You can buy pegged Euros using Ardor. But, if you want to do the reverse transaction and you want to buy Ardor using Ignis, then you must initiate that trade from the Ignis Child Chain’s coin exchange. The same process must be followed if you want to use pegged euros to purchase Ardor, you must navigate to the AEUR chain and initiate the trade from the coin exchange there.

Moving on, you can review your open orders and exchange history in the left side menu. A more extensive video on the coin exchange has been released by Ardor FYI here.

Continuing Your Journey

That’s it for the basic features available on the Ardor parent chain. We have only just begun to scrape the surface of what Ardor can do. For those of you looking to keep it simple, continue learning about the basic features available on Ardor’s first child chain, Ignis, here.

You also have the option of learning more about the revolutionary features of Ardor, such as Transaction Vouchers, which eliminate the potential for wiring or sending funds to the wrong account address. Transaction Vouchers make it easy to send dual signature invoices and share distributions on the blockchain. They also make it possible to create counterfeit-proof “deposit” and “withdrawal” vouchers. Learn more here.

Turing-complete lightweight contracts represent the next generation in smart contract technology and it’s a feature exclusive to the Ardor ecosystem. These contracts eliminate costly data migrations and make it cheaper and easier for businesses to integrate their operations with the blockchain. Oracle contracts are also a possibility. Written guidance on lightweight contracts is available here and here, and a 25-minute seminar discussing the technology is available here.